Recently, there have been the rumblings of an emergent pan-Latin American student movement. Crucially, this potential movement coheres around the demand for a right to education. In Colombia and Chile a new front is being fought against the creation and maintenance of private education and the implicit commodification of learning. However, this emergent trans-continental rights-demand(…)
Few are willing to make comparisons between this past year’s radical political activity in the UK – from the student protests to the major TUC demonstration – and the Tottenham riots. The reasons for this are fairly obvious: there is no unifying political goal of these ‘looters’, ‘hooligans’ and ‘thugs’. Theirs instead appears to be a(…)
Sanex, a toiletries corporation, have a new advert. They tell us that ‘Your underarm skin has three fundamental rights: A right to effective twenty-four hour protection, to moisturization and to a natural Ph balance’. In this post I would like to briefly explore these rights, before talking a little more seriously about two newer rights(…)
In the last months, we have seen the emergence of ‘Anonymous’. In particular, in the days after the widespread attack on Wikileaks (following their publication of leaked US diplomatic memos) they emerged with a fairly credible threat to take down major global internet presences (belonging to both states and corporations). They have continued to post(…)
This is the full contents of a memorandum published on the 3oth of November by wikileaks. It concerns the actions of the ‘Shannon Five’, and the responsiveness of major world powers to democratic mobilization in Ireland. All spelling errors were in the original. C O N F I D E N T I A L(…)
DuVall summarises the American abolitionist Frederick Douglass’s thought: ‘if submission were replaced by civil resistance, the people could pierce the shroud of oppression, shifting power in a way that few in the world would have comprehended.’ The starting point for civil disobedience is injustice. However, the question always placed at the feet of those who resist(…)
The images of the Gardai’s horse charge or their over-zealous use of the baton (knocking a young woman out cold and bloodying the faces of others), being used on peaceful student demonstrations has a chilling effect. We are unaccustomed to seeing our Gardai in the same light as (the very often violent) Italian or French(…)
In this podcast recorded earlier in September, Illan rua Wall conducts a wide-ranging interview with Wendy Brown; the Heller Professor of Political Science at University of California, Berkley. Interview with Wendy Brown Prof. Brown engages initially with the question of critique, and its relation to rights. She refuses to reject rights, but instead seeks to question(…)
The question of populism and radical change has re-emerged in American politics, first with Obama and now with the tea party movement. However, it was another story that recently caught my eye. The New York Times carried a story about Republican ‘agents’ (or ‘operatives’) encouraging homeless people to stand unopposed in the Green Party primaries.(…)
At last weeks first birthday workshop on human rights in Ireland, Fergus Ryan from DIT, suggested that the crucial problem for human rights activists in Ireland was that decisions at the ECHR or Supreme Court were seen as the end of the story, ignoring what he called the ‘cultural change’ necessary for successful human rights(…)
